Who Gets to Design a Drydock?
NAVFAC Hawaii just signed a $249M architect-engineer IDIQ with a Honolulu joint venture on qualifications alone, five days after the contract it replaces ran out of ordering authority. One sentence in the synopsis decided who could compete, and a bidder asked the Navy in writing to take it out.
The Pipeline
Every brief →- Nov 111 min read
The Pipeline: November 2026
The forward ledger of major defense contracts approaching recompete: $449B across 1,212 contracts through October 2028, two deadlines that both land on November 6, and the sixteen rows that left the board this month without a single competition behind them.
Subscribers - Nov 13 min read
The Option Runway Is a Services Problem
We pulled every FPDS action behind all 1,212 contracts on the expiration pipeline and asked which end dates the Government can simply move without competing anything. 224 of them. Army, Navy and Air Force sit within one point of each other, and the spread that matters is six to one between engineering services and construction.
Subscribers - Oct 317 min read
Who Reviews an Option Exercise?
GAO dismissed a protest on October 27 because an exercised option is contract administration and nobody gets to argue about it. The footnote in the same decision describes the one argument that does get heard, and $88.5B on our board came in on exactly the kind of modification it covers.
Subscribers - Oct 313 min read
Ten Days to Bid a Five-Year Contract
DeCA put five years of commissary facility maintenance on the street as three special notices with a ten-day window. DFARS 212.70 is why the award never gets synopsized, and why your solicitation filter missed all three.
Free - Oct 315 min read
How a Sole Source Stopped Being 6.302
Twenty DoD justifications posted since Thursday morning. Nine have a text layer, six cite a renumbered paragraph, and none of them says 6.302. Inside: DISA's 18-month bridge that walks an eight-year small business requirement onto Alliant 2, an MDA justification that approves $95.86M more than the board announced, and three Navy filings that took 30 days under a 14-day rule.
Subscribers - Oct 306 min read
Who Pays for a Recompete That Keeps Not Starting?
The Space Force is consolidating communications work at Peterson, Schriever and Cheyenne Mountain into one $330M small business competition. SBA released the legacy 8(a) contracts in June. Yesterday the office posted that the solicitation will not be released, and deleted the schedule from the notice. Inside: the 18 months of option runway that makes the delay free for the Government and expensive for everyone else.
Subscribers - Oct 304 min read
The Vehicle Closed Before the Order Did
We classified every one of the 1,212 contracts on the expiration pipeline by the paper underneath it. 703 are orders rather than contracts, and 185 of those ride a vehicle that can no longer take a new order. That changes who is allowed to bid on the follow-on, and when it has to surface.
Subscribers - Oct 304 min read
Five Sentences and a CAGE Code
The SSN(X) program office says its concept-design solicitation is coming under other-transaction authority, and the entire way in is an email due Thursday night. The box asking whether you are a traditional defense contractor is what decides whether the Navy can sign at all.
Free - Oct 294 min read
Twenty-Nine Notices Named the Incumbent Out Loud
In the 48 hours to Thursday morning, 1,922 active DoD notices went up and 29 of them typed a contractor's name into the body text. The Navy wrote 22 of those. Inside: the bridge that admits it is one, a $945.9M sole source, and a SeaPort recompete whose notice spells its own incumbent wrong.
Subscribers - Oct 293 min read
How One Amendment Turns One in Nine Into Two in Five
Every SAM notice carries an amendment count and nobody prices it. We timed 11,687 DoD solicitations and found the whole signal sits at the first amendment: unamended, the live version lands inside the last week 11% of the time, and one amendment takes that to 41%.
Free - Oct 296 min read
DISA's Pegasus Bridge Rides a GSA Contract
DISA bridged its Pegasus network support this morning by placing a sole-source order on HII Mission Technologies' own OASIS+ contract. That paper answers to a different FAR subpart than a J&A, and SAM.gov stopped giving it its own shelf in October 2019. Here is the field that still tells the two apart.
Subscribers - Oct 284 min read
Who Took the Fifth Seat at Eglin?
Four companies won seats on the 96th Test Wing's range-target powertrain recompete on Monday, and all four already held the work. The fifth notice posted this morning, and it names a New Jersey obsolescence shop with no contract action in that NAICS in eighteen years of trying everything else.
Free - Oct 287 min read
The Only Option Left on DISA's Link 39
DISA intends to hand dark fiber O&M at Link 39 straight back to By Light, sole source, on November 30, the day a ten-year contract runs out of runway. The notice cites a competition authority that does not exist in the CFR, and the window to say anything about it closes November 11.
Subscribers - Oct 284 min read
The Fourth Biggest Buyer on Your Board Doesn't Buy Anything
We refreshed the expiring board this afternoon and ranked it by agency. The fourth largest name on it, at $39.41 billion across 32 contracts, is an organization the FAR bars from running a follow-on acquisition. Here is who will actually run those recompetes.
Subscribers - Oct 274 min read
The Recompete Never Says So in the Title
We pulled every active Department of Defense notice published on SAM.gov in the five days to this morning. Of 2,368, eight used the words follow on or recompete, and four of those eight were the same Eglin award posted four times. The ones worth your week say it in paragraph three, where they name the contract they are replacing.
Subscribers - Oct 274 min read
How a Justification Posts 78 Characters and Still Follows the Rule
We read the body text of every active Department of Defense notice published in the last fourteen days, 5,800 of them. The justification, the one notice type the FAR actually tells you what to put in, runs a median of 78 characters. The content is in a half-megabyte PDF nothing can search.
Free - Oct 276 min read
$249 Million Rides on a Package You Can't Revise
GAO denied an architect-engineer protest this week, and the reasoning is worth more than the outcome. Under the Brooks Act nobody has to tell you what is wrong with your SF 330, and you would not be allowed to fix it if they did.
Subscribers - Oct 264 min read
Who Skips a Recompete They Were Winning?
The 96th Test Wing just handed four companies the same $4,706,351.30, to the cent. Five years of delivery orders on the vehicle it replaces show that the two seats taking the most money are the two missing from the list.
Subscribers - Oct 264 min read
The Incumbent Below Every Reporting Floor
DISA's telecom division awarded T2 Technologies two more circuits this morning. Twenty-one years, 489 contract actions and $9.2 million later, not one of them has ever been big enough to announce.
Free - Oct 267 min read
Five Points of 125 Doubles Your Share
DCSA's draft personnel vetting fieldwork package re-ranks its contractors every six months and converts the ranking into a percentage of the daily workload. Price is 50 of the 125 points, and in the agency's own worked example the cheapest bidder takes twice the work of a better performer. Feedback closes November 4.
Subscribers - Oct 256 min read
Why Would the Navy Compete Less Often?
NAVSEA amended its Multi-Ship Sustainment Partnership solicitation Friday night and moved proposals to Dec. 21. The structure underneath it hands groups of three to six DDG-51s to a single-award IDIQ, which means no fair opportunity, no synopsis, and one competitive event covering three years of Norfolk availabilities. The Navy wrote down why in its own market research.
Subscribers - Oct 253 min read
The Award Notice Is a DLA Habit
We pulled every DoD award notice SAM.gov touched over 57 hours: 553 of 600 came from the Defense Logistics Agency, and the Army, Navy and Air Force posted 47 between them. If you run an award-notice alert to catch competitor wins, this is the shape of what you are actually watching.
Free - Oct 255 min read
The 2,308 Notices That Only Looked New
SAM's modified-date sort handed us 3,000 rows this weekend and 2,308 of them carried one of three timestamps matched to the second, every one an already-dead notice. Strip the archive job out and the top of what is left is the draft package DCSA's $1.55 billion fieldwork recompete has owed industry for fourteen months.
Subscribers - Oct 244 min read
Who Does the Navy Let Build SUBSAFE Hardware?
Friday's board raised a Submarine Safety hardware ceiling to $148 million and put four names on the line. One is a Pennsylvania small business that walked in through a standing on-ramp, and the next version of the same program closes December 4.
Free - Oct 246 min read
Seven and a Half Years, One Year at a Time
AMIC exercised option year two on AFCENT's air traffic control contract eight days before the period was due to close, and the Pentagon board is the first public trace of a decision made in September. The structure behind that timing puts the real ACCOMS-3 recompete six months earlier than the date sitting in FPDS.
Subscribers - Oct 244 min read
How an Exercised Option Stays Invisible for 90 Days
We refresh the expiration pipeline from USAspending and commit it with every post, so the desk has dated snapshots of the same 1,132 contracts two weeks apart. Between them, $943.3 million in obligations appeared. Not one dollar came from an action newer than July 23, and the end date you are planning against moves inside that blind spot.
Subscribers - Oct 234 min read
Why Raise a Ceiling With Seventy Days Left to Order?
Thursday's board added $350,000,000 to Raytheon's Small Diameter Bomb II support IDIQ, a vehicle that stops taking orders on December 31. The follow-on has been sitting in SAM since July, it is sole source, and it asks alternative vendors to reverse engineer the guidance software. Plus two single-bid IDIQs from one Army office, a third DLA on-ramp, and the week's one new front door.
Subscribers - Oct 236 min read
The Air Force Admitted the Violation and Kept the Award
A briefing package sent to the incumbent on EOMS II had an extra slide in it: every offeror's evaluated labor cost, set costs, and the ranking of all three total evaluated prices. Final proposal revisions were due thirteen days later. The head of the contracting activity found a Procurement Integrity Act violation and cleared the procurement anyway, and the Air Force re-awarded to the same company. GAO sustained both protests in part on Oct. 13.
Subscribers - Oct 234 min read
How a 2022 Solicitation Just Awarded a 2031 Contract
Six companies joined DoD contract vehicles this month, every one of them off a solicitation decided in 2022 or 2023. DLA's standing solicitations have no competition date for a capture pipeline to track, and the newest seat orders until October 2031.
Free - Oct 224 min read
The Contractor Dyess Ran Out of Room For
The 7th Contracting Squadron just added $10 million to a base engineering vehicle it awarded three years ago. The company on the other end has held that work since 2017, through two set-aside competitions, and the ceiling is the part that keeps moving.
Free - Oct 224 min read
The $10 Billion Ceiling That Shows Up Twenty Times
Every one of the 479 contract vehicles under our live expiration board reports $0.00 obligated. Read their ceilings instead and you get $20.67 trillion, forty-three times the board itself. Here is where the number breaks and which recompetes it distorts.
Subscribers - Oct 226 min read
Eleven Years on a Ten-Year Ordering Period
MDA extended Raytheon's AN/TPY-2 sustainment IDIQ by two years on October 21, ten days before the ordering window would have closed, and lifted the ceiling to $2,999,033,000. The new period runs 11.01 years from the 2017 award, and the statute puts the ordinary limit at 10.
Subscribers - Oct 215 min read
Why Is a Winning Protester Still Capped at $150 an Hour?
GAO just told FEMA to pay a winning protester $313 an hour, more than double the statutory cap on protest attorneys' fees. The cap was written in 1994 and has never been raised. Here is the mechanism that gets past it, and why almost nobody uses it.
Subscribers - Oct 213 min read
The Median Contract Runs Four Years. The Money Runs Nine.
We sorted the $471 billion expiration board by how long each contract has been running. Sixty-four contracts have been in place a decade or more, they hold 38 percent of the money, and 36 of them drew a single offer.
Free - Oct 215 min read
How the Same Sole Source Gets Two Different Rule Numbers
Rock Island noticed its intent to sole-source an Army-wide software vehicle twice this year, once under FAR 6.302-1 and once under the overhauled 6.103-1(b). Monday's board put $307,723,563 on it, with one bid solicited and one received. Plus three Commercial Solutions Openings, the HRS GEN VI draft RFPs, and the second DLA on-ramp in three business days.
Subscribers - Oct 204 min read
The Seat Next to Leidos
The Defense Health Agency put its deployment bench up unrestricted, took 29 complete offers and handed out twelve seats. Two of the twelve went to small businesses, and the agency's own list marks them with an asterisk: a Frederick woman-owned shop with $351 million of mostly civilian health IT behind it, and a San Antonio 8(a) firm whose entire prime record until now was five contracts nobody else was asked to bid.
Free - Oct 204 min read
45 Recompetes, 22 Dates That Have Already Gone By
NAWCAD Patuxent River refreshed its long range acquisition forecast on Monday, incumbents and contract numbers attached. Every calendar RFP date in the file is in the past, and three trainer CLS lines show what that does to the end dates on your board.
Subscribers - Oct 206 min read
$100 Million Is Where the Paper Trail Starts
The Air Force signed a $332,830,519 cyber data contract on the last day of the fiscal year, through a marketplace notice that required no synopsis, and announced it nineteen days later. Twenty days on it is still absent from FPDS, USAspending and SAM. The one thing its size does trigger is a written determination and a notice to Congress, due November 14.
Subscribers - Oct 195 min read
Who Reads a New PWS in Seven Days?
Friday put seven services notices on SAM.gov and four of them close inside ten days. DIA threw out the work statement on two and left the deadline alone, and DISA finally said out loud what it intends to do with the Fort Meade base operations work it told you it was consolidating in August.
Subscribers - Oct 194 min read
Nobody Is Reading SAM on September 29
We pulled every Department of Defense justification notice SAM.gov will serve, 10,000 of them, and counted them by the day they posted. An ordinary business day carries twelve. September 29 carried 49 last year and 45 this year, the two tallest days in twenty months, and strip out DLA's parts notices and the top five days are all in the same week.
Free - Oct 195 min read
How Twenty Contracts Become Three
The Army told industry on Monday that more than twenty legacy SETA and fielding contracts at Aberdeen are being folded into three enterprise vehicles. The notice names no contract, no incumbent, no dollar figure and no deadline. The award record supplies all four.
Subscribers - Oct 183 min read
The Ninth Name on the Abstract
Everything the federal record knew about Sustech LLC was four small Interior Department jobs worth $520,994 between them. On October 16 the National Guard Bureau handed the Trujillo Alto firm a $16,017,438 military construction award at Camp Santiago, the lowest responsive bid of nine opened in June.
Free - Oct 184 min read
Nineteen Rows, Six Recompetes
Thirty-seven groups of expiring DoD contracts share an issuing office and an exact end date, and 31 of those dates are fiscal housekeeping. The six that are not mark a single procurement act wearing three contract numbers, and the date itself tells you whether the vehicle or the order is what comes up for bid.
Subscribers - Oct 186 min read
Four Years Is a Long Time to Hold a Bid Open
GSA told Polaris small business offerors on Friday that a Court of Federal Claims decision from September requires action before it can proceed with awards. The 102 contracts GSA announced in December 2024 are already on the federal record, filed under a description that tells you not to look at them, and in 657 days they have not carried a single task order.
Subscribers - Oct 173 min read
Who Cancels a Solicitation After the Bids Are In?
We put every canceled Department of War services solicitation this fiscal year next to the deadline printed on its own notice. The largest group of cancellations posted after that deadline had already passed, and the worst of them arrived 454 days late.
Free - Oct 174 min read
Three Offers, Three Awards, $5.4 Billion
Friday's board added three companies to Air Combat Command's contracted air support program, with a $5.4 billion ceiling over them. Between them they hold $6.9 million of prime work, and the order book they are joining runs dry by next September.
Subscribers - Oct 175 min read
How One Justification Buys Five Years of Orders
NAVAIR put $170.8 million of uncompeted Boeing work on Friday's board, split across two instruments. One of them owes the public a new justification every time it buys something. The other owes one document, due by October 30, to cover everything it buys through 2031.
Subscribers - Oct 164 min read
The Vehicle With One Company's Name On It
Army Contracting Command at Aberdeen has been standing up single-vendor enterprise IDIQs one company at a time. Shift5 got one on October 14, eight months after joining Next Generation Command and Control as a subcontractor on Anduril's team, and its $99 million ceiling is more than twice every prime award the company has won since 2019.
Free - Oct 165 min read
Norfolk Already Bought the Next Bridge
A $23.9 million Navy test and evaluation award landed Wednesday with a six-month extension already priced into it, at $2,512,152. Four vehicles at the same office expired on the same day in May, and covering that gap took a sole-source contract that is on the public record.
Subscribers - Oct 164 min read
A One-Bid Recompete Is the Best News on Your Board
450 of the 1,219 contracts on our expiring board reached the incumbent without a second bidder. Only 130 of them were ever open to one, and that minority is the only part of the single-bid pile that belongs in a capture decision.
Subscribers - Oct 155 min read
One Award in Ten Drew a Crowd
The holiday pushed this week's first contract boards to Tuesday and Wednesday. Ten new awards landed across the two of them, worth $9.15 billion, and seven solicited exactly one source. The one that drew nine offers is 1.1% of the money. Also on the boards: a sole-source bridge that announces its own breakup, and a $33 million modification that unannounced itself a day later.
Subscribers - Oct 153 min read
How Long Does a Wrong Announcement Stay Wrong?
Wednesday's board had one line in its entire Air Force section, retracting a $33.1 million L3Harris modification announced the day before. We counted every correction on 308 daily contract boards: a third of them carry one, the median correction lands five days late, and seven took the award back completely.
Free - Oct 157 min read
How a $200 Million Garrison BPA Becomes a $0 Entry
The 409th CSB told industry on Thursday that USAG Stuttgart's base operations will be recompeted as a BPA under OASIS+, solicited on GSA eBuy, with the RFP due December 4 and the incumbent's last call order expiring December 15. GSA's own guidance says FPDS cannot record a BPA established under OASIS+, and the workaround it recommends is to file the agreement at zero dollars.
Subscribers - Oct 134 min read
Who Renovates a Military Clinic in Three Countries?
USACE Europe District just put every Defense Health Agency minor-construction job in Germany, Belgium and Italy behind one $49 million design-build vehicle. The firm that won it shows up on the federal record sixteen years ago renovating a coffee shop at Landstuhl for $8,272.
Free - Oct 136 min read
The Set-Aside Was Decided on October 1
NSWC Crane told industry on Friday that a property management support requirement is coming back as a competitive 8(a) task order on SeaPort-NxG. SBA had already accepted it eight days earlier, and the acceptance date settles more than who may bid.
Subscribers - Oct 134 min read
Eight Business Days, Thirteen Other Transactions
Congress gave the services a construction authority that is explicitly not a contract in last December's NDAA. DoD construction notices invoking an Other Transaction ran at zero in nineteen of the last twenty-five months. Thirteen have posted since October 1, four of them on Tuesday afternoon, and the statute lets whoever wins the first one take the follow-on work without further competition.
Subscribers - Oct 126 min read
The Blue Text Box That Won a $7.9 Million Recompete
GAO released the Peterson's decision on Thursday. The agency rated Vantage Point's proposal outstanding with no weaknesses, and when the protester pointed out that it never answered a mandatory requirement, the agency pointed at a marketing box describing a Department of Labor program the awardee never claimed to have worked on.
Subscribers - Oct 124 min read
How 3 P.M. in Honolulu Becomes Tomorrow
SAM keeps a solicitation's deadline as a UTC instant and the issuing office's clock as a separate field. We converted one into the other for every DoD solicitation posted last quarter. On 266 of them the two records disagree about what day your proposal is due, and 256 of those disagreements run in the direction that costs you the bid.
Free - Oct 124 min read
A Third of Friday's Sole Sources Were Somebody Else's Contract
DoD published fifteen sole-source justifications to SAM on Friday. Five of them name an award number the Department never issued: four GSA schedule contracts and a NASA SEWP seat, one of them signed in 2012. The publication clock on those five is GSAR 538.7104-3, and the orders are not in USAspending yet.
Subscribers - Oct 115 min read
The Solicitation Number Changed Jobs
In May, M67004-26-R-0003 was market research for a multiple-award IDIQ. In September the same number came back as a SeaPort-NxG task order, and the nine-month order holding the work together reports a competition that closed in 2021.
Subscribers - Oct 114 min read
The Busiest Second Name in Defense A-E
IMEG has no prime contract with the Department of War under its own name, and it already sits on six Pentagon architect-engineer ceilings. Thursday at Arnold made seven. The vehicle every time is a joint venture, and the partner in front of the name keeps changing.
Free - Oct 114 min read
How Many Bidders Did Your Incumbent Actually Beat?
FAR 2.101 says full and open competition means all responsible sources are permitted to compete. Whether any of them did is a separate field in the award record, and almost nobody screens on it. We crossed the two on all 505 DoD contracts over $50M expiring between April 2027 and September 2028: 307 of them, holding $214.8 billion, reached the incumbent without a contested bid.
Subscribers - Oct 105 min read
Whose Fault Is a Bridge Contract?
Three bridge justifications posted on Thursday, and each one blames something different: two protests at Naval District Washington, a court case at USACE Huntsville, a 43-day shutdown at NAVFAC EXWC. The Navy's own regulation already decided which of those excuses count. Plus a sustain at DHRA with no decision text, an executive order that moved a task order's contract type ten days before responses are due, and a four-line board.
Subscribers - Oct 104 min read
How Two Digits Date Your Whole Pipeline
Positions seven and eight of a solicitation number are supposed to name the fiscal year the instrument gets signed. We decoded all 5,312 readable numbers on DoD services notices published in fiscal 2026. Nine in ten are honest, and the ones that aren't are wrong in a direction that changes month by month.
Free - Oct 107 min read
110 Seats You Fill or Credit Back
The Army cancelled its medical instructor recompete in 2024 and told GAO the replacement would carry a price realism analysis. The replacement landed Friday night, and it carries nine pricing subfactors, a locked rate card, and a clause that deducts every empty seat from your own invoice at the burdened rate you proposed.
Subscribers - Oct 94 min read
The Co-op That Audited Its Way Into a Twenty-Year Contract
Kodiak Electric Association's entire federal prime record ran to $350,642 across twenty-one years. On September 30 it took a contract with a $31.3 million ceiling that runs to 2046, and the step between the two was a single audit.
Free - Oct 94 min read
The 995 Contracts That Can't Buy Another Year
We pulled the potential end date on all 1,166 DoD contracts over $50M expiring between April 2027 and September 2028. On 995 of them it is the same day as the current end date, meaning there is no pre-determined option left for the government to exercise. That is $382.0 billion with no quiet way out.
Subscribers - Oct 96 min read
A Twelve-Month Option Can't Buy a Fifteen-Month Audit
Ernst & Young took the Navy, Air Force and agency-wide Pentagon audits inside 28 days on three single quotes, $1.86 billion in all. Two of the three went straight back to the option structure that made the last pair run long.
Subscribers - Oct 85 min read
Who Objects to an Award That Already Happened?
Navy Strategic Systems Programs posted a notice of intent to award on Tuesday afternoon and gave industry until noon Wednesday to say something about it. The contract had been signed on Sept. 21. It is the third sole-source services award SSP has put on the public record in eleven days, and the three of them come to $211 million.
Subscribers - Oct 84 min read
Most SABER Handoffs Don't Hand Off
We pulled every Simplified Acquisition of Base Engineering Requirements vehicle in the Air Force record: 65 contracts across 34 contracting activities. Ten of the 17 handoffs between generations left the base with no SABER on the street, for a median of 260 days, and the two worst gaps in the whole record both closed this year.
Free - Oct 87 min read
How a Set-Aside Grew Without a New Justification
NAVSEA republished its submarine outsourcing consolidation notice on Tuesday with the scope widened from fast attack boats to the whole submarine force. The justification text is word for word what it was in December 2024, down to the typos, and the seven-day gate in FAR 7.107-5(c) puts the earliest lawful solicitation on October 12.
Subscribers - Oct 74 min read
The Age Filter Hiding in Our Dollar Floor
We counted every DoD base operations contract coming off period of performance in our own forward window. There are 533 of them and our board carries 19. What the missing ones have in common is age: eleven of them are already worth $50 million or more on their own award records.
Subscribers - Oct 74 min read
The $7,750 Order That Comes Before the $921,811 One
Weldin Construction ran minor construction at Nellis as 322 delivery orders over five years, half of them under $10,000. On September 30 the Alaska HUBZone firm won the follow-on, and the ceiling went from $70 million to $185 million.
Free - Oct 75 min read
How Five Army Posts Came Up for Recompete at Once
One MICC field directorate office is recompeting base operations at five Army installations. Three are solicited, two of them want proposals at the same hour on November 13, and every incumbent is running on a bridge or a vehicle that dies in the first five weeks of 2027. At two of the five, the set-aside changed.
Subscribers - Oct 65 min read
Twelve Vehicle Actions a Day Is the Baseline
DISA threw out the NS-ACE solicitation and wrote it again. The Pentagon's own security-systems contract went out with the incumbent 50 days from expiry, and that incumbent won it last time on one bid. Monday's SAM.gov feed carried fourteen vehicle actions, which is what an average business day looks like.
Subscribers - Oct 67 min read
The Small Business Set-Aside Bought the Incumbent a Bridge
The Air Force posted a sole-source justification today for Medusa counter-drone engineering work. Its own text says the delay that made competition impossible came from deciding to set the follow-on aside for small business, and from the FAR overhaul. Leidos keeps the work either way.
Subscribers - Oct 64 min read
How Much of Your FY28 Pipeline Hasn't Shown Up Yet?
We matched our expiring-contract board against its own two-month-old snapshot, contract by contract. The quarter nine months out picked up 121 contracts it didn't have in August. The quarter eighteen months out picked up 16.
Free - Oct 57 min read
How a Sustain Becomes a Deadline
GAO told the Army in August to amend the MAPS solicitation and reopen it for revised proposals. The Army has not touched the notice since June 19, seven more protests have been denied against the unamended terms, and October 10 is the sixty-day mark under 31 U.S.C. 3554(b)(3).
Subscribers - Oct 55 min read
Hanscom Published the Answer Key
The Air Force's Force Protection Systems Division put GUARD's entire scoring sheet on SAM.gov before the solicitation exists: 1,651 points, itemized down to 40 for an annunciator. You can total your own score this afternoon.
Free - Oct 54 min read
146 Orders Are Expiring on Vehicles That Already Closed
Four in ten task orders on our expiration board run past the last day their vehicle can issue an order. For 146 of them, carrying $23.6 billion, that day has already gone by, and 22 of those sit on OASIS pools GSA shut in 2024 and 2025.
Subscribers - Oct 47 min read
Who Competed for the $630 Million?
ACC-APG spent Sunday afternoon raising a single-award IDIQ's ceiling from $70 million to $700 million. It is the fifth such notice in six weeks, none of them a justification, and the competition they all rest on was a five-minute video assessed under a solicitation SAM.gov cannot find.
Subscribers - Oct 43 min read
One in Four Sole-Source Justifications Beats the Award
We pulled every justification DoD posted to SAM.gov in FY2026 and measured the gap between the award date each one cites and the day it went public. The median is four days, 637 were public before the contract was signed, and the long tail is not what it looks like.
Free - Oct 44 min read
Nobody Is Writing the Recompete Package
The Army posted a sole-source intent for $206 million of communications sustainment on Friday afternoon, 29 days before the incumbent's contract ends, and put the quiet part in the notice body. Also in the sweep: $729 million of ceiling added to three single-award software IDIQs in 65 minutes, a seven-day fuse on a Navy support services RFP, and a Marine Corps IT recompete that changed fiscal years mid-posting.
Subscribers - Oct 34 min read
The Guard Shack Was the Beachhead
A South Dakota security company that has guarded the gate at Cavalier Space Force Station since 2023 just took the station's fire department for $25.3 million. Seven firms bid this time. One bid last time.
Free - Oct 36 min read
How One White Paper Buys a Year of Navy Barracks Work
NAVFAC is buying barracks under 10 USC 2808a, the other-transaction construction authority Congress created in December, against a portfolio the Navy puts above $6B. The qualifying white papers closed Thursday, the entry bar was cut by two thirds 13 days before they did, and the statute lets the follow-on work go to the same companies without further competition. OTAs 2, 3 and 4 are still to come this month.
Subscribers - Oct 34 min read
A Fifth of Our Moved End Dates Didn't Survive a Second Pull
Across 48 sweeps since August 3 we watched the period-of-performance end date change on 108 of the 1,461 major DoD contracts we track. We re-pulled every one of them against the award detail page today. 87 held. The other 21 include five Huntsville services orders this desk read wrong in August.
Subscribers - Oct 23 min read
Most of What the Pentagon Announces Is Ceiling
We split all 63 Department of War contract boards from July through September into individual announcements and classified each one off the contract number: 1,116 actions, $463.9 billion announced, and only $47.2 billion of it a new definitive contract. The quarter's largest number obligated $343,740 at award.
Free - Oct 24 min read
How Old Was the Docket You Checked This Morning?
Four GAO decisions posted today, one of them decided 28 days ago. Inside: the Fort Carson tradeoff that paid $1.98M for an incumbent teammate, the DISA protest killed by its own agency-level filing, Eglin's whole civil-engineer services package put on a single 2032 clock, and two NAVSUP sole sources citing two different section numbers on the same board.
Subscribers - Oct 26 min read
Day One of FY27 Brought a $4.2 Billion Option
USTRANSCOM's Civil Reserve Air Fleet action led the first Pentagon board of the fiscal year at $4,216,308,442. All thirty contract numbers on it were signed in 2024, the window it covers is Option Period 1 to the day, and the notice that made it possible was owed to every holder by April 3.
Subscribers - Oct 111 min read
The Pipeline: October 2026
The forward ledger of major defense contracts approaching recompete: $444B across 1,231 contracts through September 2028, the 140 rows that left the board this month, and what happened when we re-checked every date we published in September.
Subscribers - Oct 13 min read
How Twelve Years of Set-Asides Become an Unrestricted Seat
NAVSUP Fleet Logistics Center Norfolk seated seven firms on a nine-year business-management vehicle for Navy Personnel, Manpower and Training. The largest estimated value on the list went to a San Diego shop whose biggest prime award to date is $16.8 million.
Free - Oct 15 min read
How Do You Bid an RFP You Can't Open?
SOCOM's counterproliferation support recompete went out September 28, 71 minutes after the draft comment window closed. The next day the government added the condition that decides the bidders list before any evaluation starts: a NIST SP 800-171 assessment score of 110 posted in SPRS, verified, before anyone is allowed to read the documents.
Subscribers - Sep 305 min read
Twenty-Four Companies Wrote DISA's Sole-Source Case
DISA reposted its combatant command market research at 19:20 Zulu Monday evening and published the justification that closes it 43 minutes later. The document names every firm that answered, and uses their answers as the proof that only Leidos can do the work.
Subscribers - Sep 304 min read
How to Read the Incumbent's Team Before the RFP Drops
Thirty-six companies are being paid under the Army's enterprise resource planning contract, which comes off period of performance in April 2027, and the government publishes every one of their names and what each one is worth. On half the services work expiring over the next two years that file is empty, and whether it is empty has almost nothing to do with how much subcontracting is going on.
Subscribers - Sep 303 min read
1,066 RFPs Went Out and Never Changed
We read the publish history on every Department of War services solicitation posted this fiscal year. Three in ten were never touched again after the day they dropped, which means the amendment you built your bid schedule around may not be coming at all.
Free - Sep 294 min read
What Fifteen Years of Small Orders Buys at Tinker
Thomas Instrument has been rebuilding bomber power drive units for the Air Force Sustainment Center since 2011, on 33 orders with a median value of $333,505. Monday's board gave the Brookshire, Texas shop a ten-year requirements contract for the B-2 and B-52 rotary launcher drive, estimated at $209,961,884. The incumbent overhaul contract expires tomorrow.
Free - Sep 295 min read
The Only Other Vendor on the IDIQ
Military Sealift Command posted three exception-to-fair-opportunity justifications in 35 minutes this afternoon, all on the same contract. One of them says the second seat holder emailed on July 24 to say it cannot do the work. Four companies bid this vehicle, two won it, and every order that has needed a justification has gone to the same one.
Subscribers - Sep 294 min read
How a Closed Vehicle Hands Off a $572 Million Program
Space Systems Command re-awarded Cheyenne Mountain's warning-system sustainment to Amentum on Monday for $572.4 million. The 2020 order rode OASIS, which stopped taking orders in March 2025. The new one rides Alliant 2, and its completion date sits 89 days past the last day Alliant 2 can carry a task order. Plus nine more notices that moved Monday.
Subscribers - Sep 284 min read
Whose Market Research Actually Stopped?
Today's free census measured the 42-day lapse at the Army, Navy and Air Force. The other half of the department splits in two: the five defense agencies that write requirements by hand lost more than half their market research, and DLA did not lose any. Which one you sell to decides what December 11 costs you.
Subscribers - Sep 283 min read
The Layer a Shutdown Takes Out First
FY2027 opens Thursday on a CR that expires December 11. We pulled three fiscal years of SAM.gov notice volume for the Army, Navy and Air Force to see what the 42-day lapse actually did to the front of the pipeline. Solicitations went out at close to normal rate. Sources sought notices halved, and the year finished 1,394 short.
Free - Sep 285 min read
Nine Tenths of Your Price Was Already Filled In
The Army's fuels maintenance recompete at South Atlantic Division drew four proposals, rated all four identically on every non-price factor, and came down to price. Then $44,363,415 of every bid turned out to be a number the government had typed in itself. GAO's decision, released Thursday, closes off every route a losing offeror had against the low bid.
Subscribers - Sep 275 min read
Why Nobody Else Bid on Camp Parks
Thursday's board gave Calidad Industries $28,341,792 for five years of base operations at Parks Reserve Forces Training Area and recorded one bid. The last time this requirement was awarded, FPDS coded it extent B, not available for competition, and the award notice said why in one sentence. The annual price has gone up 2.1 times since 2016 with no competitor ever pricing against it.
Subscribers - Sep 274 min read
The Small Business That Keeps Winning Its Own Follow-On
R. Ward & Associates has held the Army's Sustainable Range Program task order contract at USACE Savannah since 2019. The Corps drew the first one down to $20.93 of its ceiling and the second to $43,559.56, and on Thursday the company took the third against four proposals. Both recompetes started when the money ran out, with years still on the ordering period.
Free - Sep 275 min read
One Bid Showed Up for $350 Million
The Army awarded Defense Unicorns a $350 million firm-fixed-price IDIQ for Army Enterprise software delivery on Thursday and received exactly one proposal. The company's entire prior federal prime record is 27 actions worth $151.3 million. Plus seven more notices that moved Friday, and what changed on DHA's dental recompete the same afternoon we published it.
Subscribers - Sep 263 min read
How Long Is a Draft RFP Good For?
Two draft RFPs landed in the last day and a half, one at SOCOM and one at the Air Force. We pulled every Defense draft RFP posted to SAM since October 2024 and asked what happened next. Of the 161 on file, 37 have produced a real solicitation under the same number, a median of 90 days later. A hundred of them are still the only notice that has ever posted on that number.
Free - Sep 265 min read
How an End-of-Life Part Grows an Incumbent's Contract
USSOCOM posted a sources-sought notice Friday morning asking whether anyone other than Collins Aerospace can absorb an increase in scope on the Tactical Mission Networking sustainment contract. Responses close at noon Monday. The vendor's own last time buy letter, dated May 1, 2025, is where the increase came from.
Subscribers - Sep 264 min read
Five Years Stopped Being the Ceiling in February
Of the 375 Defense services contracts of $50 million or more coming off period of performance between March 2027 and September 2028, 54 run within two days of exactly five years, and the five-year bin is twice as tall as any other on the board. FAR 17.204(e) is what pressed that shape into the market, and DoD stopped using it on February 1.
Subscribers - Sep 255 min read
Which Rulebook Is Your Compliance Matrix Citing?
NGA posted a notice of intent to sole-source the Foundation Sustainment Services bridge to Leidos and cited the authority as RFO 6.103-1(c)(2). Across every DoD notice touched Thursday and Friday morning, 17 of the 40 that cite a rule at all use the overhauled numbering, and one Air Force notice cites both systems for the same sole-source authority.
Subscribers - Sep 257 min read
The Fourth Bridge at Falls Church
The Defense Health Agency published a notice of intent this morning to hand Deloitte a fourth consecutive sole-source bridge on its program management support requirement. The competed vehicle underneath it expired three years ago, the market research is thirty months old, and the work on the books has fallen from $50.7 million to $3.9 million along the way.
Subscribers - Sep 254 min read
$87.7 Million of Army Trousers, One Tennessee Sewing Floor
Omega Apparel stopped sewing Army trousers in Smithville, Tennessee in November 2019. Eighty-one days later a new company restarted the same buildings, and on Sept. 24 it took an $87,699,684 DLA ceiling, 3.1 times the vehicle it replaces.
Free - Sep 244 min read
Your March Recompete Needed Its RFP Number Last Fall
On 441 of the 632 DoD contracts on our expiring board that carry a solicitation number, the award landed in a later fiscal year than the number it was competed under, a median of 328 days after that year closed. Here is what that arithmetic does to $4.57 billion of services work that stops in the first half of 2027.
Subscribers - Sep 246 min read
The Marine Corps Wants a Contract That Gets Smaller
MARCORSYSCOM is running market research on the follow-on to a $129.6 million Leidos task order, and the ask across 51 questions is plain: bring your own automation, at your own cost, and bill fewer hours for it every year. Responses close October 19.
Subscribers - Sep 243 min read
How 35 Bidders Produced 34 Winners
Across the 16 multiple-award vehicles the Department of War announced this month, 201 companies bid and 141 came away holding a seat. The Air Force put 34 of 35 bidders on a $3.5 billion environmental MATOC. The Army's National Capital Region solicitation explains why in writing: it deleted price and past performance from the evaluation under a FAR authority that only works if the government promises to award every qualifying offeror.
Free - Sep 235 min read
Whose Past Performance Are You Actually Bidding?
GAO released four protest decisions on Tuesday and sustained exactly one ground: NSF could not credit KBR with an affiliate's record when the proposal never said what the affiliate would do. That sent an $8 billion, 20-year vehicle back for a new selection decision. Three separate attacks on the awardee's people all failed.
Subscribers - Sep 234 min read
The Crane Company the Marine Corps Kept Coming Back To
Alloy Crane & Machinery started in 1953 as a one-man welding shop outside Savannah. On Tuesday it won a $24 million Blount Island ceiling for the Navy's over-the-shore gear, more than every federal prime award it has booked since 2008 put together.
Free - Sep 236 min read
Eleven Seats, Eleven Thousand Dollars
Army Contracting Command put all three lanes of its live training vehicle up for a possible open season this morning, with responses due Oct. 7. One of those lanes holds Lockheed, General Dynamics, Cubic and HII, carries a $378.7 million ceiling, and has issued $11,000 of work in the 540 days since award. Here is what a seat on each lane has actually earned, before you spend two weeks trying to win one.
Subscribers - Sep 225 min read
The Change Order Was Bigger Than the Contract
The Army added $697.7 million to GM Defense's Infantry Squad Vehicle contract on Monday through a single engineering change modification, one bid solicited and one received. That is more than every ISV delivery order placed since the contract was competed in 2020, and it takes the contract's cumulative face value to $915.6 million.
Subscribers - Sep 224 min read
How the Osprey Line Closes Without the Money Leaving
Naval Air Systems Command bought the V-22 loads and dynamics model data on Monday, sole source, for work it describes as happening prior to and concurrent with production cessation. Bell Boeing's obligations fell 61 percent when the line wound down and then stopped falling. There is $7.83 billion of V-22 work on the expiring board and 99 percent of it has never been competed.
Subscribers - Sep 223 min read
131 Services RFPs in 22 Days
Between September 1 and this morning the Department of War posted 131 solicitations in the ten services codes we track. The identical window produced 51, 49 and 45 in the three prior years. Sources-sought notices, the thing you watch to see a recompete coming, did not move at all.
Free - Sep 215 min read
What Happens When Only Two Firms Qualify
NAVFAC Hawaii could not slate three qualified A-E firms for its Honolulu utility engineering recompete, so it relaxed the criteria and started the procurement over. The incumbent picked up a four-month bridge on Monday. The ordering period on that 2020 contract now runs 579 days past where it was written to end.
Subscribers - Sep 214 min read
The Phase III Shop That Showed Up With a Bid
Shipcom Federal Solutions has been paid $74 million by the federal government since 2020, and almost none of it came through a competitive range. On Friday the Houston company won a $16.9 million Army depot network job against six other bidders, which is a different kind of record entirely.
Free - Sep 214 min read
100 Commercial Solutions Openings and One of Them Is Trash Pickup
The 374th Contracting Squadron re-posted its Yokota refuse disposal buy on Monday morning as a two-step closed Commercial Solutions Opening, PSC S205, garbage collection. DoD has now published 100 notices titled that way this fiscal year, against 72 in the previous three combined, and three more weekend notices moved base services onto other transactions and calls for solutions.
Subscribers - Sep 205 min read
The Incumbent's Union Contract Just Became Everybody's Price Floor
NAVFAC Marianas deleted the area wage determination from its Guam custodial recompete on Friday and dropped in the incumbent's collective bargaining agreement with IBEW Local 1260, then told offerors to price to it. The deadline did not move. Proposals close at midnight tonight Eastern, and the Service Contract Act made those rates binding whether or not the amendment ever posted.
Subscribers - Sep 204 min read
How an Option Year Wins the Recompete Nobody Ran
On 181 of the 1,217 DoD contracts expiring on our board, the award record carries a second, later end date, and $79.3 billion of option value across the board has never been exercised. Here is how to tell which of your 2027 pursuits is a competition and which is a contracting officer's written determination.
Subscribers - Sep 203 min read
$34 Billion Is Riding Vehicles That Stopped Taking Orders
Of the 1,218 DoD contracts on our expiring board, 707 are orders issued under a parent IDIQ, BPA or GWAC. On 209 of them the parent stopped accepting orders a median of 440 days ago, which means the follow-on cannot go back where the work came from.
Free - Sep 194 min read
The Army Told You This One Was Coming Sixteen Times
Army Contracting Command Orlando has been publishing its Agile Professional Services requirement since April 1. Yesterday the RFP landed: the whole SETA and professional support layer at CPE ST3 consolidated into one labor-hour contract, set aside 100% for small business, decided by three pass/fail phases and the lowest acceptable price.
Free - Sep 195 min read
How a Competed Cloud Vehicle Stops Competing
DISA posted three JWCC exceptions to fair opportunity in twenty minutes on Thursday night, all of them to the same provider. Plus two Air Force ceiling increases eleven minutes apart, twenty Kansas grounds contracts folded into one task order, and four GAO decisions that gave protesters nothing.
Subscribers - Sep 197 min read
How 58 Barracks Became a Prototype
Fort Campbell is buying five years of barracks maintenance under the prototype authority in Title 10, single award, no set-aside, with a follow-on sustainment path that never has to be competed. Proposals are due September 25. The Army's own condition data puts $287.9 million of restoration work behind a $5 million annual ceiling.
Subscribers - Sep 183 min read
Two Weeks Is the Whole Proposal Schedule
Fifty-one services solicitations hit SAM.gov in the first eighteen days of September. Three in five close inside two weeks, and the median gives you 11.3 days from posting to offers due. Here is what that does to a capture plan.
Free - Sep 185 min read
The Urgency Showed Up 222 Days After the Proposals Did
DISA took proposals on the recompete for its own acquisition system on December 1, 2025. The incumbent's contract ran out June 30, and eleven days later the agency signed a sole-source bridge on unusual and compelling urgency. The solicitation notice had been telling the market a bridge was coming since before proposals were due.
Subscribers - Sep 183 min read
How Short Is Your Real Call List?
Every contract coming off period of performance in the next two years was bought by one of 245 contracting offices, and ten of them own two thirds of the $404.8 billion. Here is the ranked list, the 109 offices you will deal with exactly once, and the six names near the top that never competed a dollar.
Subscribers - Sep 176 min read
What Happens When the Same Team Reads Your Proposal Twice
GAO released a decision today that the Army won three weeks ago. CSA Global walked into corrective action on a $299 million Army National Guard training recompete holding the low price, walked out with a new risk against it, and the evaluators built that risk out of CSA's own staffing table.
Subscribers - Sep 175 min read
The Fuel Program Went to Bridge in Two Oceans
The Army's Huntsville engineering center posted two fuels-maintenance bridges 19 hours apart on Wednesday, one for the North Atlantic and one for Korea, and the Atlantic one went from sources-sought to sole-source intent in five days. Three of this month's eight bridge justifications landed on that single day, plus a recompete RFI for the DoD information analysis hub and a base-ops RFP that quietly replaced its own solicitation number.
Subscribers - Sep 173 min read
How a Montana Company Won Back the Air Force's Parts Desk
S&K Aerospace has bought non-standard parts for foreign military sales customers since 2012, lost the program to Amentum in 2023, and on Wednesday took it back at $4.3 billion running to 2039. The sources-sought notice, the eight amendments and the 299-day evaluation are all still on the record.
Free - Sep 164 min read
Why the Biggest Contracts Expiring Aren't for Sale
Fourteen contracts carry 20.6% of every dollar coming off the DoD board between March 2027 and September 2028. Thirteen of them are coded not competed, only one source, and what they buy is parts for a production lot assigned years ago. Two would pass a services NAICS screen without blinking.
Subscribers - Sep 163 min read
What's Left on the Board After September 30?
There are 5,301 open DoD solicitations right now, and 84% of them close before the fiscal year does. The count underneath that number is the one worth planning against.
Free - Sep 167 min read
$14.8 Billion Crosses the New CAS Line on October 1
The Cost Accounting Standards Board's threshold rule takes effect in two weeks and doubles the full-coverage trigger to $100 million. We re-pulled every DoD contract expiring in the next two years: 581 of them now sit under the new line, and 211 of those are cost-type, which is the only place the change actually bites.
Subscribers - Sep 155 min read
The Options Ran Out Before the Recompete Started
Space Systems Command exercised the last option on LinQuest's MILSATCOM engineering contract in February, and on Tuesday it told the market it wants up to 24 more months without competing. Nothing resembling a follow-on has been posted to SAM.gov since 2018.
Subscribers - Sep 155 min read
The Company That Built the Network It Now Has to Defend
NAVSUP Fleet Logistics Center Norfolk asked exactly one company to quote on securing the Naval Observatory's precise time enterprise, and on Monday it announced a $61,570,161 IDIQ to JFL Consulting of Edgewater, Maryland. The five years of work that made that a short conversation are all sitting in the award record.
Free - Sep 155 min read
How a Task Order Grows Without Anyone Bidding
NAVFAC Far East spent Monday night explaining why nobody else on an Okinawa construction vehicle gets to bid on Modification P00004. The same evening, the Army handed 41 small businesses a billion-dollar vehicle and promised they would compete for every order.
Subscribers - Sep 144 min read
Who Stops Competing in September?
A USACE task order runs out on Sept. 29 and needed a sole source extension, because the option to extend it was in the RFP but never priced. We pulled three fiscal years of DoD obligations by competition code to find out how much of the year-end surge actually moves that way. On the services side the competed share went up in September, all three years. The whole drop sits somewhere else.
Free - Sep 145 min read
The Justification Is the Last Thing to Arrive
The Marine Corps posted its reasoning for a $1.9 billion sole-source food services award thirteen days after signing it, one day inside the FAR clock. That, plus SOCOM cutting three years off POTFF III and five other things that moved Monday.
Subscribers - Sep 146 min read
How a Product Line Runs Out of Bidders
Three companies bid on the Army's Live Training Transformation product line in 2009. Five bid in 2014. When the Army ran the same competition again in 2019, after an RFI, a sources-sought and a published draft solicitation spread across 807 days, exactly one company bid. Last Wednesday the notice for the next cycle went up, and it asks whether the work can be set aside for small business.
Subscribers - Sep 134 min read
What Happens When the 8(a) Clock Runs Out?
Peerless Technologies signed its first 8(a) contract in February 2009 and its last in April 2018. On Thursday, eight years after the set-aside coding stopped, it took an $85 million ten-year ceiling out of AFRL against eight offers. The whole transition is sitting in FPDS if you know which field to read.
Free - Sep 135 min read
DISA Named Its Only Source Before Writing the Justification
87.7% of the new award dollars on Friday's Pentagon board went out on a field of one. Over the weekend DISA told the market Motorola is the only source on an Army enterprise radio requirement while the J&A is still in coordination, a New York Air National Guard sole-source notice reposted 29 hours after its own objection deadline closed, and NAVFAC opened the only genuinely contested thing on the wire.
Subscribers - Sep 135 min read
125 Days of Slip Fit Inside a Bridge Nobody Announced
NAVFAC Southwest has moved proposals on the China Lake base operations recompete three times since June, and the incumbent's funded year ran out on August 15. The sole-source vehicle signed thirteen months ago is why none of it needed a new justification.
Subscribers - Sep 126 min read
How a Ceiling Triples Without a Solicitation
Friday's Pentagon board announced a $13.4 billion ceiling increase on Boeing's KC-46 sustainment vehicle, taking it from $5.7 billion to $19.1 billion. The modification was signed on June 2, 2022. Eighteen mods sit on that contract and exactly one of them moved the ceiling, recorded as work within scope.
Subscribers - Sep 124 min read
Cost-Plus Draws a Crowd on the Right Vehicle
424 of the 1,208 DoD contracts running out between March 2027 and September 2028 are cost-reimbursement, carrying $139.9B, and they come back with a single offer 62.6% of the time against 46.1% for fixed-price. Sort the same rows by whether the award sits on a vehicle and the pattern moves, which changes what you should be screening on.
Subscribers - Sep 123 min read
$71 Billion Comes Off Contract With a Partner's Name on It
156 of the 1,208 DoD contracts running out between March 2027 and September 2028 carry foreign funding on their latest recorded action. 85.3% of them are coded not competed, against 40.2% for everything else, and the gap holds in every family on the board.
Free - Sep 117 min read
Who Bids on the Pentagon's Own Audit?
DFAS put the Department of War's agency-wide consolidated financial statements out for quote, a scope the Inspector General has audited in-house for eight years, and got one quote back. It went to Ernst & Young on a labor-hour order with a $989,996,050 ceiling running to March 2032. Across 95 audit orders DFAS has placed, the seven biggest averaged 1.6 quotes.
Subscribers - Sep 114 min read
Three Air Force Bases, One Very New Joint Venture
Eastern Shawnee - Bay West JV has taken two Air Force Optimized Remediation contracts in sixteen days, one of them against eight bidders. Its only contract in the federal award record is a year old, and the bench it ran on belongs to its mentor.
Free - Sep 114 min read
The Do-Over Only Had One Name on It
USCIS reopened the third award slot on a $200M-plus immigration IT recompete for exactly one vendor, the one that had just filed at the Court of Federal Claims. GAO sustained the protest that said the other eligible vendor deserved the same look. Plus two sole-source bridges posted in one afternoon, a five-year enterprise IDIQ nobody gets to bid, and an Air Force tradeoff that paid 28% more for a better rating.
Subscribers - Sep 106 min read
Whose Schedule Is That Order Actually On?
The Space Force moved a Los Angeles AFB IT shop onto the Air Force's $5.7 billion EITaaS Wave 1 BPA, kept performing through the protest, and lost on both scope grounds. GAO says terminate the order and recompete it.
Subscribers - Sep 104 min read
The Quietest Way a Recompete Disappears
Thirty-four contracts dropped off our 6-to-24-month expiration board in five weeks. Thirty-one of them left because somebody rewrote the end date on the award record, and sixteen of those rewrites moved the date toward you.
Subscribers - Sep 103 min read
$226 Billion Shows Up on the Board After the Fact
651 of the 6,482 award paragraphs on the last 500 Pentagon daily boards carry a stamp saying the contract was already signed, $226.2 billion of them. A quarter print more than ten days after the award, and in the DLA section it is more than half.
Free - Sep 95 min read
Two Corrective Actions Later, the Incumbent Is Off the Job
DLH protested the same NIH task order twice and won corrective action both times. Then its order lapsed, the agency signed a sole-source bridge to the company it had been trying to award, and GAO said that was fine. Plus $4.8 billion of CIRCM on a single bid, a $289 million Navy services vehicle awarded without competition, and Fort Gordon's consolidation coming apart four days after SBA blessed it.
Subscribers - Sep 94 min read
Eleven Years of Seats, Then a Contract of Their Own
Aerospace Training Systems Partners has held a seat on the Air Force's training-systems vehicle since 2015, next to Boeing, Lockheed and CAE. On Tuesday the Navy handed the Oklahoma joint venture $10,096,092 to upgrade the P-8A flight trainer's projection system, on a small-business set-aside that drew four offers.
Free - Sep 83 min read
One Bid Is Still a Competition
We read the offer count out of every award paragraph on 500 Pentagon contract boards. Of the 2,438 announcements that say the requirement was solicited, 689 came back with a single offer. The sole-source awards are counted separately, and they are not what is driving the number.
Free - Sep 86 min read
How the Army's Own Cost Estimate Got Into Your Bid Workbook
ACC-APG released the final RFP for the PD BECS engineering support recompete on Tuesday, set aside for small business, which locks the incumbent out of priming it. Four of the eleven tabs in the pricing workbook every offeror has to fill in are the government's own estimate, built off the incumbent's GSA rates.
Subscribers - Sep 85 min read
$15.7 Billion Comes Off Contract on September 30
Seventeen DoD service contracts of $50 million or more hit the end of their period of performance in 22 days. On seven of them, worth $8 billion, the government can keep going for years without competing anything, and the field that tells you which is which is not the one on your pipeline.
Subscribers - Sep 74 min read
Who's Across the Table on a Services Recompete?
155 of the 1,170 DoD contracts coming off period of performance in the next two years are held by a small business. In professional and management support it is 28.3% of them, and on more than half the set-aside that got them there is not on the contract they hold.
Subscribers - Sep 75 min read
The Smaller Contract Won the Consolidation
Fort Gordon's base operations have gone 8(a) five times running, most recently a $126 million award to KGJJ Engineering. On Friday SBA approved the consolidated follow-on as a HUBZone set-aside, which is the program the $8 million enclave contract next door carries. Plus $611 million at OMDAC with no option years left and 54 days to run.
Subscribers - Sep 74 min read
How 95 Bids Ended With One Spectrum Sensor
Research Innovations has booked $166 million of federal prime work since 2012, almost all of it computer systems design and R&D task orders. On Thursday the Army handed it a five-year, $99.5 million contract to build and sustain a three-and-a-half-pound box, out of a field of ninety-five.
Free - Sep 63 min read
Who Books $3.3 Billion Without a Bidders List?
Seven organizations run DoD's eleven FFRDCs, and together they booked $3.34 billion of contract obligations this fiscal year. Three of them rank inside DoD's 100 largest vendors. None of that work ever reached a solicitation, and there is exactly one point in the cycle where it is contestable.
Free - Sep 65 min read
Twenty-Four Years on One Competition
Friday's board handed Northrop Grumman the Missile Defense Agency's IRBM/ICBM targets work through August 2035, one offer solicited and one received. The last time anyone else got to bid was March 2011, and the only public window to object ran sixteen days in February 2024.
Subscribers - Sep 66 min read
The 339 Agreements That Never Come Up for Recompete
Friday's board put $241,340,000 of F/A-18 repair work through a Boeing instrument whose ordering period closed thirteen months ago and whose recorded value is zero. One Navy supply command runs 339 of them, carrying 21,576 orders and $10.77 billion. Sixty-five orders on our own expiration pipeline sit under one.
Subscribers - Sep 54 min read
The Commercial Preference Stops Before Your Recompete
FAR 12.101 tells agencies to buy commercial whenever commercial will do the job. Of the 1,170 DoD contracts coming off period of performance in the next two years, 131 were. We mapped where those 131 sit, and which named services programs are already coded for a part 15 recompete.
Subscribers - Sep 53 min read
The 150-Person Shop That Just Got Its Own DLA Vehicle
Pentaq Manufacturing has sewn $335 million of uniforms since fiscal 2011 without ever booking a single award above $8.6 million. In thirty days it won two DLA Troop Support ordering vehicles, the second one a $763 million ceiling for the services' PT gear.
Free - Sep 55 min read
How a $1.2 Billion Winner Came Up One Simulator Short
Aero Simulation won the Air Force's C-17 training task order, watched three rivals protest it away, and got excluded from the do-over for counting a simulator whose motion legs had been removed. GAO decided that on July 31. The page where you would read it printed it on Thursday, alongside seven other decisions running as much as 86 days behind.
Subscribers - Sep 44 min read
Your Seat on the Vehicle Guarantees You $500
NAVFAC put five roofing contractors on a $200 million MACC on Wednesday and obligated $5,000 apiece. Across DoD, 3,214 guaranteed minimums since 2023 have a median of $500, and 433 of them are zero. The ceiling on the press release is not a number anybody owes you.
Free - Sep 46 min read
The Second Bidder Disappeared and the Ceiling Didn't Move
USTRANSCOM recompeted stevedoring at Charleston, Savannah, Wilmington and Morehead City. In 2020 the work drew two proposals and went LPTA. In 2026 it drew one, at a ceiling $153,657 lower than six years ago, 374 days after proposals closed and 27 days before the incumbent's ordering period ran out. Norfolk, Guam and three Texas ports are next in the same queue.
Subscribers - Sep 45 min read
How Five Amendments Spend a Bridge Year
NAVFAC Mid-Atlantic bought its incumbent a bridge year at MCAS Beaufort on June 2, then posted the recompete 23 days later and has pushed the proposal date four times since. The bridge costs 44% more than the option year it replaced, and a third of it is gone before anyone has bid.
Subscribers - Sep 34 min read
Who Tells You Two Recompetes Just Became One?
DoD posted 39 consolidation notices this fiscal year, up from seven in 2022. Not one of them carries a NAICS code, so a code-based saved search cannot see any of them. One Corps district accounts for thirteen, which leaves twenty-two that matter, and one of those folded 83 Air Force contracts into a single uncompeted order.
Subscribers - Sep 35 min read
The Cyber CSO That Drew Thirty Bidders
Telos Corp. took the $37.8M ACC/A2 IDIQ on August 28. Call 0001 of the IC Commercial Solutions Opening drew thirty offers, a deeper field than most Air Force cyber recompetes get.
Free - Sep 34 min read
Somebody Moved Fort Jackson's Recompete to 2028
The Army gave the market three days to object, then added $180 million to an incumbent's ceiling with one business day left on its ordering period. The reason is a food service prototype being run as an OTA at two other posts. Plus a second $90 million DLA bridge, a $712 million fuze contract with one bidder, and five protest decisions.
Subscribers - Sep 23 min read
Why a Corrected Award Date Only Ever Moves One Way
The Pentagon's daily contract board has printed 176 corrections in two years, and 102 of them are fixing the award date. Not one moved the date earlier. The reporting rule says why.
Free - Sep 25 min read
The Navy Named the Winner 18 Months Early and Still Couldn't Price It
NAVSUP Weapon Systems Support told the market in February 2025 exactly who would get the five-year F414 component PBL, and roughly when. The $2.87 billion award landed Sept. 1 undefinitized, obligated to the dollar at the DFARS ceiling, with the price still open.
Subscribers - Sep 27 min read
Nobody Got to Bid on $1.9 Billion of Mess Halls
The Marine Corps competed its garrison mess halls in 2018 and got four offers per lot. Tuesday's board replaced them with a directly negotiated award to a state labor department, $1.9 billion guaranteed and $4.06 billion if the option runs. The statute that did it turns ninety this year, and it is still moving.
Subscribers - Sep 14 min read
Who Came Back First From the xTech Cohort?
In January the Army signed ten Direct to Phase II contracts out of xTechOverwatch, every one of them inside a $3,153 band. Tern AI's was the smallest of the ten. Last Friday's board carried its follow-on at $11,263,793, one bid solicited and one received.
Free - Sep 111 min read
The Pipeline: September 2026
The forward ledger of major defense contracts approaching recompete: $414B across 1,205 contracts through August 2028, the 131 rows that left the board this month, and the first thirteen entries to move off watch.
Subscribers - Sep 14 min read
September Is the Month Nobody Asks You Anything
For four straight fiscal years, the month DoD posted the fewest sources sought notices was September, and the month it posted the most sole source justifications was the same one. Market research runs a third below the yearly rate while justifications run twice above it. Here is what that does to the 177 contracts on our pipeline that come off contract before April.
Subscribers - Aug 315 min read
Who Told You the Award Date Five Months Early?
No contract announcements posted between Friday evening and this morning, and the pre-solicitation layer moved anyway. A $292.6 million Navy range contract with 97 days left on it, five Army hospitals' food service, DDG-51 maintenance split into two competitions, and a commercial solutions opening for garbage collection.
Subscribers - Aug 316 min read
The Company That Couldn't Bid Just Got Six More Months
The Navy set aside its identification-card support recompete for women-owned small business, awarded it in July, and got protested twelve days later. GAO dismissed both protests inside sixteen days. The document Norfolk posted Monday afternoon shows what that cost: a sole-source bridge to the incumbent running to January 31, 2027.
Subscribers - Aug 314 min read
How a 42-Day Lapse Became a $68 Billion March
DoD put $13.3 billion on contract in October, the smallest month in six years, then cleared $68.6 billion in March once full-year money landed. FY2027 starts October 1 on a continuing resolution neither chamber has enacted.
Free - Aug 306 min read
The Word That Kept CSOs Out of Your Recompetes Is Gone
Section 1823 of the FY2026 NDAA struck "innovative" from 10 USC 3458 in December. On Friday the Defense Health Agency used the result to put five years of end user services out for a whitepaper, under a standing solicitation that never has to name what it replaces.
Subscribers - Aug 304 min read
The Marine Corps Just Hired an Indian Health Service Contractor
Ma'at Enterprises has 49 federal prime awards on its record and every one of them came from the Indian Health Service or Interior. Last Thursday it won a $10.7 million Marine Corps Recruiting Command IDIQ against four other bidders, and the requirement is instructional design.
Free - Aug 304 min read
$35.8 Billion Is Riding on Vehicles That Stopped Taking Orders
Two hundred nineteen of the 709 task orders on our expiring board sit under a parent IDIQ that already closed to new orders, the median one more than a year ago. The follow-on cannot come back on the same vehicle, and one Air Force office has already published where its work goes instead, with dates.
Subscribers - Aug 296 min read
How the Air Force Broke Its Own Unique Source
Three consecutive ALE-47 dispenser production contracts at Robins come back from FPDS coded the same way: not competed, only one source, one offer received. The contract announced Friday is a $147,310,777 competitive award with two offers, and eighteen dated updates on one SAM.gov notice say exactly what changed.
Subscribers - Aug 294 min read
How Much of Your Services Pipeline Is Coded as Manufacturing?
Sixty-one percent of the sustainment dollars coming off contract between February 2027 and August 2028 sit under an aircraft, missile, or shipbuilding NAICS. That one code sets the size standard, the set-aside pool, and whether your saved search ever sees the notice.
Free - Aug 295 min read
$480 Million Moved and Nothing Left the Board
Three contracts on our expiration pipeline took modifications this week and not one of them got a later end date. Plus an AFRL order still absorbing money 544 days after its GSA vehicle's period ended, thirty offers on an Air Combat Command cyber IDIQ, and two SBIR Phase III awards placed in a single afternoon.
Subscribers - Aug 284 min read
Who Answers When the Army Asks for a Spectrum Analyzer?
Thursday's Pentagon board carried 150 stated offers across fifteen competed lines. Ninety-nine of them landed on one requirement, and the company that won it was founded in 2024 and has no prior prime award record in FPDS.
Free - Aug 284 min read
The Fourth-Biggest Buyer in Your Pipeline Buys Nothing
Twelve percent of the DoD contract value coming off period of performance in the next two years is filed under an agency that awards none of it. Filter your board by agency and you drop $49.6 billion, including a $1.6 billion Navy maintenance recompete whose proposals are due September 30.
Subscribers - Aug 286 min read
How a Protest Rewrote What Counts as Experience
DISA reopened its combatant command migration market research on Thursday afternoon with responses due 24 hours later. The reference job it now asks bidders to match is 12,000 users across 20 sites, against a requirement of 231,000 users across 200. That number is the whole acquisition strategy.
Subscribers - Aug 273 min read
Nobody Has a Real Two-Year Pipeline
Pull every DoD contract over $50 million that comes off in the next 24 months and the second year holds 612 awards against the first year's 1,537. The far end of a forward board is thin because most of the paper that will fill it has not been signed yet.
Free - Aug 276 min read
DISA Gave Itself 37 Days
A consolidation notification posted Wednesday folds two Fort Meade facilities contracts into one. The incumbent's order ends November 1, the GSA vehicle it rides stopped taking orders in March, and the earliest the solicitation can issue is September 25.
Subscribers - Aug 274 min read
Dataminr's Second Recompete Went Nothing Like Its First
A $317.8 million follow-on landed on Wednesday's board eight offers deep and 30 days before the incumbent contract expires. Last cycle the same requirement lived on four consecutive bridges for 402 days, and this week DISA opened its EM5 recompete with a year of runway.
Subscribers - Aug 264 min read
Ten Bids, and the Winner Had a $1 Million Record
InfoCAL JV LLC has held a prime contract for eight months and has $1,046,968.58 of obligations to show for it. On Tuesday the Army handed it a Transition Assistance Program IDIQ worth up to $79,665,638 against ten offers. The past performance that made that credible belongs to its mentor, which already runs TAP for the VA.
Free - Aug 264 min read
Most of Tuesday's Board Never Met a Competitor
Six of the thirteen new awards on the August 25 announcements drew one offer or none, and took 88% of the money. Plus DISA quietly archived the CommandNet sources sought instead of soliciting it, GAO sustained a protest over a set-aside decision nobody documented, a NAVSEA sole source survived on certification timing, and the board erased a $27 million award it had announced the day before.
Subscribers - Aug 266 min read
How $245 Million Moves Without a Solicitation
A Navy basic ordering agreement opened at zero dollars in January carries $245 million in orders today. No synopsis, no J&A, nothing to protest, and the authority for it was established at a different service in 2024.
Subscribers - Aug 254 min read
Your Saved Search Still Says 6.302
The FAR overhaul renumbered the seven exceptions to full and open competition, and DoD contracting officers started using the new numbers in March. Ten awards on the daily boards now cite 6.103-x instead of 6.302-x, including a $3.31 billion Navy direct award, and the share is running at 18.5% of this quarter's exception citations.
Free - Aug 256 min read
Whose Fair Opportunity Was It?
Fourteen companies competed for the Army Research Laboratory's IT modernization order in 2025. It has been under a stop-work since twelve days before performance was to start. On Monday the Army posted its plan for the requirement expiring alongside it, and the plan is an $8.75M sole-source modification that runs to December 2030.
Subscribers - Aug 255 min read
What a $131 Billion Ceiling Takes Off Your Pipeline
Monday's board carried a $131.23 billion sole-source ceiling for the F-15 and eleven other awards, and $134 million of that total went to work that drew a second bid. Plus a NAVSEA extension GAO just blessed on a certification the challenger cannot hold until 2027, and three Army and Navy notices that opened the same afternoon.
Subscribers - Aug 243 min read
The Last RS3 Order Gets Placed in 263 Days
Nine RS3 task orders worth $940.8 million come off contract in 2027, and seven of them end before the vehicle underneath stops accepting new orders on May 14. Six carry option runway that outlives RS3. The three that do not hold $396.5 million, and MAPS still has no award.
Subscribers - Aug 244 min read
Seven New Names on a $997 Million Vehicle
NAVFAC EXWC opened market research on its global fuel-systems MACC twenty-two months before the old one stopped taking orders, absorbed a GAO protest in the middle, and still made award with ten days left on the clock. Seven of the ten seats went to firms that had never held one.
Free - Aug 245 min read
How a Contract Grew by a Third Before Anyone Recompeted It
NAVFAC Marianas reopened its Guam custodial requirement on Thursday and amended it Monday, set aside for HUBZone small business for the fourth consecutive cycle. The task order record shows the thing being recompeted is 36% bigger than the thing four bidders priced in 2021, and FAR 19.1303 means being on Guam has nothing to do with who is allowed to bid it.
Subscribers - Aug 237 min read
Your CPARS Record Decides Who Gets the RFQ
GAO just blessed an agency that built its bidders list on past-performance ratings and then refused, twice, to send the solicitation to a schedule holder who asked for it. The rule saying it had to is still sitting in the codified FAR. DoD stopped reading that rule in March.
Subscribers - Aug 234 min read
Why Your Recompetes All End on the Thirty-First
Twelve DoD contracts on our expiring board end on February 28, 2028. Eleven end on February 29. That one-day split is the tell for a pattern that decides when half your pipeline actually comes up.
Free - Aug 235 min read
$499 Million Without a Solicitation
The weekend's procurement record: an Alaska research center's vehicle quadruples on a justification, a Marine Corps advisory pool nearly doubles its ceiling without competing it, and White Sands gave industry four days to answer a sole-source notice on a contract that dies August 31.
Subscribers - Aug 224 min read
What Replaces $3.8 Billion of LOGCAP Next March?
Five LOGCAP V performance task orders worth $3.85 billion come off contract inside a 27-day window in March 2027, and the vehicle meant to replace them is still in market research. The Army posted the LOGCAP VI scoring matrix for industry comment in July, and it consolidates LOGCAP, Army Prepositioned Stocks and EAGLE into one enterprise.
Subscribers - Aug 224 min read
The Wahiawa Nonprofit on Friday's Board
Friday's Navy section carried a $90 million custodial vehicle at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam to a nonprofit that has held the work since 2011 and has never had a competitor. The organization is worth knowing, and so is the Federal Register ledger that says which way this channel is moving.
Free - Aug 226 min read
How an Award Gets Announced Before It's Signed
Friday's Pentagon board retracted a $36.4 million Army robotics IDIQ it had announced 24 hours earlier. DFARS 205.303 requires the announcement to be filed the day before the award is signed, and across the last twenty boards all eleven date corrections moved the real award date later. The record that would settle any of it is ninety days behind.
Subscribers - Aug 213 min read
Two Companies Hold Half the Hardware Coming Off Contract
1,207 DoD contracts worth $421.6B come off period of performance between February 2027 and August 2028. Ranked by who actually holds them, the hardware half is an oligopoly and the services half is a market with 299 names in it.
Free - Aug 215 min read
Nothing on Thursday's Board Comes Back in 2028
Fourteen services awards and modifications landed on Thursday's Pentagon board. Four of them return to the market before 2028, ten are gone until 2029 or later, and a $5.7 billion ordering period that was 40 days from closing just bought itself four more years.
Subscribers - Aug 217 min read
$330 Million Comes Down to One White Paper
The Space Force is consolidating four communications contracts across Peterson, Schriever and Cheyenne Mountain into a single award, and running it as a closed Commercial Solutions Opening. That method eliminates you on a white paper due December 1, and it carries rules most capture shops have never had to price.
Subscribers - Aug 204 min read
Would You Have Seen This Recompete Coming?
The Army moved an eleven-year incumbent off its biometrics support seat with a task order competed on GSA eBuy, three proposals, thirteen days to respond, and no SAM.gov notice at any point. GAO's denial reached the public docket Thursday. The winner's fifteen-year prime record is 90.6% Department of Energy money.
Subscribers - Aug 203 min read
The Wyoming Instructors Inside the Saudi THAAD Fielding
A Laramie SDVOSB has quietly held the Army training vehicle putting THAAD instructors in Jeddah for the Royal Saudi Air Defense Forces. Tuesday's Aug. 19 board added $9.5 million and 15 months to the seat.
Free - Aug 207 min read
An Agency Can't Make You Bid Alone
GAO sustained a protest against the Army's $50 billion MAPS solicitation over four words buried in a question-and-answer file. The remedy is an amendment and a reopening, and the scorecard arithmetic says exactly who that helps.
Subscribers - Aug 193 min read
How Much of Your Pipeline Was Ever a Competition?
We pulled the competition record on all 1,197 DoD contracts above $50M coming off period of performance between February 2027 and August 2028. Competition won 53.4% of the rows and 38.4% of the $444.82B. One sole-source exception carries $209.89B of it by itself.
Free - Aug 195 min read
How a Price Gets Negotiated When Nobody Else Shows Up
NAVFAC Pacific dropped the small business set-aside on its Pacific architectural A-E vehicle and took the ceiling from $50 million to $249 million. The set-aside version drew three SF-330s. The open version drew one, and FAR 36.6 gives a contracting officer nowhere to walk when the negotiation stalls.
Subscribers - Aug 195 min read
$35 Million More on a Contract Solicited in 2019
NAVFAC EXWC bought $35 million of ordering room on an urgency justification because a 2024 EPA rule outran a 2019 solicitation. Also in the sweep: the Navy held FTSS VI's industry day before most of the market knew it was scheduled, DLA Energy is shopping a fuel contract that runs into the 2050s, and the Air Force will only take offers from vendors the FAA has already blessed.
Subscribers - Aug 183 min read
The Archaeologists Who Keep Winning the Recompete
A women-owned firm in Stone Mountain, Georgia has held the Army Corps' nationwide cultural resources vehicle through three straight competitions while the bidder field went from four to thirteen. On Friday's board it took a fourth, at a second district.
Free - Aug 185 min read
How the Army Buys $665 Million by the Hour
Monday's board carried a $664,805,774 time-and-materials IDIQ to Parsons out of Army Contracting Command Redstone, seventeen firms solicited and four bidding. T&M is the type the FAR reaches for last, this one runs 1,789 days, and the ceiling is the only thing standing between the government and an open meter.
Subscribers - Aug 185 min read
Every End Date You Track Is 92 Days Stale
We diffed fifteen sweeps of our own expiration board and caught 33 DoD contracts moving their end date. Not one of them moved it this month. Every change traced back to a modification signed in April or May, surfacing on the day DoD's public-release delay ran out.
Subscribers - Aug 175 min read
When Is a Recompete Not Worth the Paperwork?
Four DoD justifications posted in a single afternoon on Friday, and every one of them adds capacity to a vehicle that was competed years ago. One says the follow-on competition can't physically be run in time. Another says a recompete isn't worth the administrative burden, after 40 firms raised their hands.
Subscribers - Aug 173 min read
Four in Ten Expiring Contracts Are Out of Ceiling
We pulled the funded ceiling on every DoD prime contract coming off the board over the next two years. Of the 1,200 with a ceiling on record, 497 have already obligated every dollar of base and all options. That decides whether the incumbent's runway comes from the contract or from a new action.
Free - Aug 165 min read
Four Volumes Reopened, and Technical Wasn't One
GAO cleared the Army's second corrective action on a $251.7M systems engineering order under RS3 last week. Offerors got to rewrite four proposal volumes, and the technical factor that beat the protester twice stayed shut. The order has now been in competition 732 days. The vehicle it rides stops taking orders in 271.
Subscribers - Aug 164 min read
Five German Builders and a Company From Elkridge
The Army awarded its Germany-wide facilities SRM MATOC on Aug. 14 to six firms sharing a $249 million ceiling. Five of the addresses are German. The sixth belongs to a Maryland contractor that spent its first two decades on 8(a) work inside the Beltway.
Free - Aug 154 min read
Your Account Plan Doesn't Cover the Services Pipeline
We rebuilt the expiring pipeline by issuing office this morning. Three contracting offices hold half of the $301B in product work coming off contract by August 2028. The $99B services half is spread across 186 offices, and 85 of those have exactly one contract on the board.
Free - Aug 154 min read
How Seven Years of Options Hide Inside a 2027 End Date
We put the option runway at 30% of expiring services work nine days ago. On the desk's standard segmentation it is 20.3%, and it concentrates in two families. The named programs whose 2027 dates are decisions rather than deadlines.
Subscribers - Aug 156 min read
Eleven Bids for a Contract That Ends in 2052
The Army just handed its entire initial-entry helicopter training pipeline to one contractor for 26 years, bought through a commercial solutions opening with no certified cost or pricing data. Four contracts collapse into one, the two largest incumbencies expire eight days apart in January, and the next time this work is contestable, most of the people reading this will be retired.
Subscribers - Aug 143 min read
What Do You Do When the Set-Aside Doesn't Come Back?
NIWC Pacific's small business cyber vehicle stopped taking orders in March 2022 and its replacement has still not been announced. Sentar held one of those four seats, spent the gap winning unrestricted work, and on Aug. 12 took a seat on the open successor alongside Booz Allen, Leidos and SAIC.
Free - Aug 144 min read
Six Months and a Call for Solution
Accenture's ETMS2 contract ran out today and got six more months on the way out, while the thing replacing it is a Call for Solution on an Army open solicitation that can land on an OT. Also on the boards: a CIRCM definitization obligated to exactly 75 percent of its ceiling, two identical one-bid IDIQs at one Corps district, and three corrections.
Subscribers - Aug 133 min read
Nothing Over $500 Million Is Set Aside
We pulled the FPDS set-aside determination on all 584 standalone DoD contracts above $50M that expire between February 2027 and August 2028. Set-asides carry 1.73% of the dollars, and above half a billion the share is exactly zero.
Free - Aug 135 min read
How to Get on a Contract That Isn't Being Competed
Military Sealift Command put a fifth ship repair contractor on its Guam multiple-award vehicle on Wednesday's board. The vehicle was competed once, in 2022, and its replacement is already in market research. The seat buys 15 months of ordering period and a place on the incumbent list.
Subscribers - Aug 137 min read
$657 Million No One Had to Announce
Ten DoD contracts in our expiring pipeline were awarded 8(a) sole source, and every one is far above the threshold that is supposed to force a competition among 8(a) firms. The exemption that allows it carries no dollar ceiling at all, and the first of the ten comes off contract in February.
Subscribers - Aug 123 min read
Why the Oldest Contracts Carry Half the Money
The 1,195 DoD contracts coming off period of performance between February 2027 and August 2028 hold $432.34B. The 128 that have been running eight years or more hold half of it, and only 32 of those are services.
Subscribers - Aug 125 min read
Two Sustains and Eight Clocks Still Running
GAO sustained two pre-award protests against the Army's $50 billion MAPS solicitation on Tuesday, the first wins out of 25 filings. Eight more decide between September 23 and November 12. Plus a $992M advisory-services award at Eglin, Fort Gordon going HUBZone, and DoDEA putting two overseas maintenance districts to market.
Subscribers - Aug 124 min read
The Small Business That Didn't Need the Set-Aside
SCMI1 spent six years at Mayport turning one-person support orders into past performance. When the Navy took the small business set-aside off the combat systems recompete, the company won the work anyway, at $20.8 million.
Free - Aug 116 min read
The Requirement Came Back as a Modification
The Air Force bought the Regional Operating Picture twice as a research contract, for $4.6 million all in. On Friday it bought it a third time, for $104.7 million, as modification P00008 to an ICBM sustainment contract that has received exactly one offer since 2018.
Subscribers - Aug 117 min read
The Competition That Ended in the Federal Register
Base operations at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson drew four bidders in 2021. Monday's board awarded the follow-on sole source at twice the annual run rate, and there will never be another competition, because the requirement left the acquisition system through a channel that never touches SAM.
Subscribers - Aug 114 min read
How Cost Realism Rewrites the Number You Bid
We pulled the FPDS contract type on all 1,189 contracts in the expiration pipeline this morning. Cost-reimbursement covers 57% of the expiring services dollars, and on those recompetes the evaluated figure is the government's estimate of your costs rather than the price you proposed.
Free - Aug 104 min read
Who Wins When Price Isn't in the Ranking?
USACE Kansas City ran its civil works A-E recompete under the Brooks Act, reserved four of seven seats for small business, and weighted knowledge of Iowa, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska above almost everything else. Sixteen firms submitted, four regional shops took the reserved seats, and two of them had been holding the vehicle it replaced.
Free - Aug 104 min read
The Vehicle Closed 399 Days Ago
We refreshed the expiration pipeline this morning and pulled the parent vehicle behind every expiring task order. Of the 681 orders, 305 ride a contract whose ordering window shuts before the order does, and 201 of those vehicles are already closed. That changes where the follow-on can physically land.
Subscribers - Aug 105 min read
Naples Bought Its Second Bridge With One Day to Spare
NAVFAC EURAFCENT published a justification at 3:57 Monday morning extending a construction vehicle that stops taking orders on Tuesday, and blamed a 2025 hiring freeze. That notice is the common species: four in ten DoD sole-source justifications for services are actions on contracts already running.
Subscribers - Aug 96 min read
Who Gets to Bid on an Option Year?
Military Sealift Command posted a sources sought on Thursday whose solicitation number is not a solicitation number. It is a live contract, and the notice is the FAR 17.207 option determination done in public, with a seven-day window for anyone who wants to price against the incumbent.
Subscribers - Aug 93 min read
Research Is the Least Competitive Thing DoD Buys
We split every offer count in our expiring pipeline by product service code. R&D contracts drew a single bid 43.7% of the time, three times the construction rate, and the concentration sits in the fair-opportunity orders that ride multiple-award research vehicles.
Free - Aug 96 min read
How the Army Competes a Contract Before It Posts One
A special notice went up at 6:31 on Friday evening with white papers due Sunday at midnight, no NAICS code, and a gate that only prior event attendees could clear. The authority is 10 USC 4023, and the competition it satisfies already happened somewhere you cannot watch.
Subscribers - Aug 84 min read
The Consolidation That Stayed a Set-Aside
USACE Omaha folded its fuels construction IDIQs into one vehicle, doubled the ceiling to $699M, and wrote into the consolidation notice that the whole thing stays set aside for small business. Twenty-one firms bid. Seven won seats on August 6, and only one name carried over from the last generation.
Free - Aug 84 min read
The $423 Billion Pipeline Has $29 Billion in It
Seven in ten dollars coming off DoD contract in the next two years sit in product buys. We cut the expiring pipeline by product service code, then followed the services slice down to the largest thing inside it: $1.45B of DCSA fieldwork with 235 days left and no successor solicitation on SAM.
Subscribers - Aug 85 min read
How the Door Closes Before the RFP Drops
Two Navy commands opened services competitions this week and named the eligible bidders before publishing a single evaluation factor. One of them also published its whole calendar out to a February award. Plus the Huntsville MATOC being shaped right now, a $54M ceiling raise at NAVFAC Northwest, and $543M in single-bid awards off the Thursday and Friday boards.
Subscribers - Aug 76 min read
What Gets Read Before Your Technical Volume?
Three of the four rows on the Navy's evaluation table for ProteQ read Not Evaluated. GAO's decision on why reached the public docket this week, and the answer is one corporate policy document the company had, did not need, and did not attach.
Subscribers - Aug 74 min read
Two-Thirds of the Services Pipeline Never Hits SAM
We refreshed the expiration pipeline this morning: 1,222 DoD contracts above $50M come off period of performance between February 2027 and July 2028. Narrow to services and 217 of the 326 are task orders under a vehicle somebody else already won, which means the recompete you are planning against was never going to be posted.
Free - Aug 76 min read
The Shutdown Is Still Writing Sole-Source Justifications
NAVFAC Northwest raised an architect-engineer vehicle's ceiling by $27 million yesterday without competing it, and the justification it published today names the cause: a selection board that the October 2025 funding lapse knocked off schedule. The replacement contract has been in evaluation for 357 days.
Subscribers - Aug 64 min read
The Program Office That Told You What It Wanted 16 Months Early
Kessel Run's Flight Ops office named the legacy programs it wanted to replace in a March 2025 market-research notice, showed industry its draft strategy that August, and took whitepapers in January. The $100M award reached the Pentagon's contract board on July 28, 508 days after that first notice.
Free - Aug 64 min read
Nine of Eleven Awards Don't Come Back Until 2030
Wednesday's Pentagon board was an ordinary one: no headline programs, $534M in new awards. Nine of the eleven carry completion dates in 2030 or later, including a sole-source VMware order that closes the Air Force Network's software lane until the end of the decade.
Subscribers - Aug 64 min read
How a Contract Ends Twice
We filled the base-plus-all-options end date on all 1,216 contracts in our expiration pipeline. On 183 of them the date your tracker shows is not the last date the incumbent can hold the work, and services is where the gap concentrates.
Subscribers - Aug 56 min read
The Only Job That Doesn't Qualify Is This One
The Navy set a $6.5 million floor on qualifying experience for a custodial recompete whose own contract averages $5.5 million a year. Two firms protested the number, one got it lowered, and GAO has now ruled the agency never had to check whether anybody could clear it.
Subscribers - Aug 53 min read
If It Was Full and Open, Where Was Everybody?
We pulled the offer count on all 1,207 contracts in our expiration pipeline. Of the 533 DoD coded as competed, 115 drew exactly one bid, and the single-bid rate is worst on the vehicles built to make bidding cheap.
Free - Aug 55 min read
How a Protest You Withdrew Still Sends the Bill
Abacus Technology dropped its protest of an Air Force network operations award, then filed for costs and waited 319 days. GAO has now told the Air Force to pay for two grounds and not the other two, and the line between them is a due date rather than a ruling.
Subscribers - Aug 46 min read
What Happens When 24 Protests Land on One Solicitation
Eighteen companies have filed twenty-four pre-award protests against the Army's $50B MAPS solicitation. Ten are still open, their statutory clocks run to October 19, and that date, not the Army's September target, is the earliest a clean award can happen.
Subscribers - Aug 44 min read
The Hardest Line on a Capture Plan Is a New Customer
Yorktown Systems Group has booked $538M of federal prime work since 2008 by staffing other people's schoolhouses, and almost none of it was Air Force. On Monday the Academy handed the company a five-year training contract at $51.6M, against eleven other bidders.
Free - Aug 45 min read
The 220 Days DISA Said It Didn't Have
DISA planned to hand the migration of all eleven combatant commands to Leidos without competing it. A protest against the justification killed that, and the sources sought that replaced it closed at 4pm today. Plus the week's docket moves, three sole-source locks running past 2030, and a $50M ceiling that drew one offer.
Subscribers - Aug 34 min read
Where Recompete Signals Actually Live
Most opportunity intelligence is a restated agency forecast. The public record is more honest: end dates, sources-sought notices, protest dockets, and bridge mods, in a sequence you can set a watch by. This is how our pipeline is built.
Free - Aug 33 min read
How Defense Contracts Change Hands
Recompeted is a publication about the moment a defense contract comes up for grabs: the mechanisms that decide who keeps the work, read daily from the public record. Here is what we do and who it's for.
Free - Aug 35 min read
How a 487-Day Bridge Sets the Recompete Clock
DLA put the word bridge into two contract announcements on consecutive days last week, each with a day count attached: 434 and 487. Those numbers are the agency's own estimate of how late its recompetes are, and they back-solve to an RFP date you can plan against.
Subscribers - Aug 23 min read
1,688 Protests, and Half of Them Worked
GAO's protest docket just posted its second-quietest year since 2020, while the share of protesters walking away with relief held at 52%. The chart every capture team should keep taped to the wall.
Free - Aug 19 min read
The Pipeline: August 2026
The forward ledger of major defense contracts approaching recompete: $437B across 1,197 contracts through mid-2028, the quarter the wave breaks, and what the Army's EBS-C walkaway just put back in play.
Subscribers - Jul 313 min read
The Team That Took Over AFRL's Space Experiment Pipeline
Vantage Analytical, a joint venture of two firms that spent decades in NASA's engine room, beat eight other bidders to SSHINE, the $499M single-award vehicle that carries Air Force Research Laboratory space experiments from whiteboard to orbit.
Free - Jul 304 min read
How Guam's Base Contract Became a 21-Year Incumbency
NAVFAC just exercised option six on DZSP 21's base operations vehicle, taking a contract re-awarded in 2020 at $545M to $908M of cumulative value. The mechanism keeping the recompete away is the memory of the last one.
Subscribers
See the recompete before the award notice.
What's coming off contract, which incumbents are at risk, and the mechanics that decide who wins, from the public record.